In the Wake of Disaster
by Spark Writer
Summary: Epiphanies can happen at the most inopportune times. With one day to live, for example.


_This is slightly different from my usual. Hope you like. xx_

...

...

The first thing Sherlock thinks when he opens his eyes, after _was the sun always so fucking bright_ and_ there's a least a gallon of sea water in my lungs_ and _this is the first time I've ever fallen out of an airplane_ and_ I shouldn't be alive_ is _where is—where is—where—_

A look to the right, and thank god, curled on the sand, tide frothing at his toes, is John. The sleeve of Sherlock's Belstaff clutched in his fist.

...

They get up on wobbly limbs, blinking at each other. John's button down is lost. Sherlock's is as well. He feels shivery and odd, being exposed like this. It's not what he should be worrying about. They've washed up an island in the middle of the sea and there is only saltwater to drink, and it's not what should be making his heart twitch.

John looks at his face, squinting like he's seeing something alien. His eyes drop, landing on Sherlock's bare chest and holding for the briefest of moments. He runs his tongue along his lower lip.

"Told you we shouldn't have taken this case."

Sherlock swallows his retort. "Sorry." They are hundreds of miles from civilization. John has two broken ribs. _"Sorry."_

_..._

The island is a quarter mile wide.

It's populated mostly by thickets of thorny vegetation and black-eyed gulls that regard them from tree branches overhead.

They walk the perimeter of the landmass, barefoot. John's boots have survived the disaster, but he elects to slip them off and carry them, one in each hand. His feet are paler than the rest of him, dusted with a fine down of sandy hair. Sherlock stares. His own feet are grotesquely injured. John makes him stop at regular intervals to wash the cuts out with sea water.

It stings. John hisses in sympathy.

...

After an hour's journey, they come to a cliff. "Excellent for a look-out," John notes.

Sherlock bites his lip.

...

Nighttime brings the most overwhelming darkness either of them has ever experienced.

John spends tense minutes striking two rocks together, but there's not enough friction to create a flame. Sherlock encircles John's wrist with cold fingers and tugs him up the embankment, useless and fumbling and cursing. They make it to the top and lie flat on their backs, aching within and without.

John rests his palm on Sherlock's calf, squeezes twice.

...

Raw fish tastes like life itself when you haven't eaten in 54 hours. They wolf it down, picking the fine remnants of skeleton from between their teeth with ragged fingernails.

"God, that was good," John sighs, throwing himself down on the sand. His face is rosy and peeling, his eyes like the starbursts of sea glass that keep washing to shore, his chest broad and tanned, coloured with a kaleidoscope of bruises and scars.

"Sushi was never this quality in London."

"Jesus, Sherlock." But John is laughing, eyelashes pale against his pinkened cheeks.

Sherlock pushes himself off the ground and dusts grains of sand from his torn trousers. "Come on, let's look for drinkable water."

They both know there isn't any but neither care to point this out.

That's what you do when you're standing at the end of the world. You live. You look for water.

...

"…And the acid stain in the bathroom, and that spot on the sofa that creaks, and the door knocker, and the clock that never works, and the way chimney always clogs the living room with smoke, and the rug, and the bullet holes in the wall paper, and the bloody mess everywhere, and—"

It's the little things Sherlock misses the most.

...

John's mobile runs out of battery on the third day. He crushes it beneath his heel with an easy smile.

...

In the afternoon, John strips off his trousers and wades into the sea, hair standing up from his forehead.

He's lovely, in the same way that crime scenes and bombs and forest fires are lovely: wistful and fierce, stopping one's heart, leaving them breathless in the aftermath. He turns to Sherlock and lifts his arms to the wind. He's laughing the cracked, wondering laugh of the surviving.

Sherlock lifts his arms, too, chest heaving, feels the wind lick roughly at his scapulae, spine, ankles. John beckons him forward, so he walks, he puts his feet in the water, inhales at the rush of cold, gasps. John's in up to his waist. Sherlock wants to be there. Needs to be there. He ignores the frigidity in favour of John's pleased grin and wades in and in and in until the sea is swirling around his hips, fish nipping at his calves.

When they are within feet of each other, John scoops water in his cupped palm and pours it over Sherlock's scalp. And again. And again. A blasphemous ritual that renders them both utterly quiet.

Seaweed tangles around Sherlock's ankles. His nose is full of sharp salt, his tongue painfully dry. More skin peels from the bridge of his nose. Reptilian, he thinks, and also, _Transformation._

John dives into the blue and comes up glistening.

...

In the wake of disaster, there is beauty.

...

"I'd estimate 5 milliliters remaining," Sherlock says, swirling the liquid in the canteen. They stare at each other, faces tight.

"Well," says John, "You ought to drink it. You were dehydrated to begin with."

"Rubbish. You're the one who does all the fishing and climbing and such."

"I'm not thirsty."

"Yes, you are."

"Just take it."

"No."

"I'm your doctor."

"You're my friend and I won't have you perishing from something as pedestrian as thirst."

"We'll split it."

John never listens.

"Acceptable," Sherlock says finally. He takes a very small sip, then hands it to John.

"Cheers," John mutters.

"To staying alive."

"To staying alive."

They walk back to their look-out in the gathering dusk.

...

"You should stop doing that," John murmurs when Sherlock checks his mobile for the twenty-second time in an hour.

"Can't."

The battery's run out but he keeps pulling it from his pocket and glancing at the uselessly dark screen.

"Chuck it in the sea."

"No."

John doesn't argue. He understands, even if Sherlock does not.

...

"Mycroft's getting sluggish."

"Mmm."

The sky is a yawning void pricked with light. All Sherlock can see of John is his eyes, and the constellations refracted within them.

"He'll catch on soon enough."_ He'll be here, he'll help us, we're not alone._

"'Course." John stretches and rests his arm on Sherlock's stomach.

...

As 65 percent of the human body, water is essential to people.

It flows through the blood, carrying oxygen and nutrients to cells and flushing wastes out of the body. It cushions joints and soft tissues. Without it, we perish.

...

It takes 3 days.

...

It's hot, so much hotter than it should be. The Atlantic is neither tropical nor tepid, but the sun decides to beat down with appalling heat that day, leaving them to strip their trousers and carry on in nothing but pants. John's are white, standing out against his browned skin in sharp relief. Sherlock's are blue. Same shade as his favourite dressing gown.

Surprisingly, neither has difficulty looking each other in the eye. After all they've been through together, near-nudity pales in comparison.

"If they find us like this I swear to God." John giggles, giggles, and Sherlock trips over a stump. "All right?"

"Yes," he says stiffly, rubbing discomfortingly at the bruise. He wishes John would put his trousers back on just so he wouldn't have to see how fast he's dropping weight.

...

Sometimes Sherlock thinks of the rest of world. It's bizarre, how there are people out there living normal lives and doing normal things, losing car keys and catching their children up in great bear hugs and having petty rows and eating chips out of plastic breadbaskets and seeing adverts on television for mobiles and diapers and food, and getting angry with their colleagues and wandering around Tesco's with a crinkled shopping list and browsing the shelves of the library and coming home to roast and potatoes in the oven and kissing and getting on.

He's not sentimental. He doesn't care about food or kissing or children. He does, however, care about John. And John is just like these people; he's normal, he deserves to be out there, not here.

Sherlock scrambles into a cluster of bushes to his right and vomits. He stays like at, on all fours, until he becomes too exhausted to stay upright and collapses onto his side, staring at his half-digested waste. He would vomit again, if he could. His stomach is so empty it hurts and he despises himself for wasting a meal.

He's still like that, lying there in the underbrush panting like a sick dog, when John finds him.

"Christ, what happened to you?"

"Fish didn't sit well with me."

"Jesus, I'm sorry. Can you get up?"

"Think so." He feels woozy and irregular, as if his mind is far outside the physical limits of his body. He stands. John grabs his forearm and holds tight.

"Let's go back to the cliff. Get some sleep, hmm?"

Sherlock means to say yes but his mind palace is completely water-logged and the only thing still afloat within it is John, treading water and looking like a solar storm, so that's the moniker that tumbles out instead.

...

John says it, just once. When he thinks Sherlock's asleep.

Wrong, Sherlock thinks. Of course we're going to. It's the only sure thing in the universe.

...

It's even hotter the next morning. They lie on their backs side-by-side, staring up at the bleached white clouds with glassy eyes. Their skin is peeling off in sheets.

"I just realised something," John says, sounding mildly distressed.

"What?"

"We left our trousers on the other side of the island."

They pause, absorbing this, then Sherlock turns his face toward John and begins to laugh, a grim chuckle that crescendos into something brighter. He can't stop, rolling onto his side and curling in on himself with the force of it, sweat beading on his forehead. "Shit," he gasps, "Shit, shit—"

John rolls over on top of him and kisses him.

...

It's far too warm for kissing, but that doesn't stop them. Sherlock rises to meet John, sucking at his chapped lower lip while John's hair is coarse between his fingers and his palms are hot on either side of Sherlock's face. Nothing makes sense at present, but this is the most illogical—kissing and kissing and kissing with their eyes squeezed shut on an island in the middle of nowhere while the sun cooks them alive.

But that doesn't stop them, either.

...

Epiphanies can happen at the most inopportune times. With one day to live, for example.

...

This time, Sherlock says it to John.

"We are not going to die."

John doesn't stop watching the horizon, but he does reach around behind himself to hold Sherlock's hand.

...

It rains.

Sherlock staggers down to the shore and pauses with his face upturned. The drops fall into his mouth, tasting of salt, but he swallows them all the same. John forgets to tell him not to. They spin with their arms outstretched like small children, torrents beating down on their scalps and shoulders, turning John's hair a shade of dark gold, honey. Sherlock thinks of all the bees he never kept, all the crimes he never solved, all the criminals he never captured, all the bundles of stars he never named, all the melodies he never played, all the bones resting beneath the crust of the earth.

Dying, he decides, is dull.

So he stands with John and they spin and they breathe and they feel like a part of the human race.


End file.
